Charlotte Storey – Former West End Actor

As former West End actor, Charlotte Storey is a spellbinding presenter whose superb mastery of accents, physicality, and comic timing enlivens the topics she speaks about, which include self-mastery, audacious leadership, conquering fear not simply coping with it, and the lessons of disability.

In recounting how she helped the Royal Marines Band overcome performance anxiety in preparation for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, and the for the coronation of King Charles II, Charlotte Storey shares insights about mental and physical mastery in high- pressure environments, unity and diversity in team dynamics, and the primacy of a belief in talents.

Unique in her approach to mastering her own disability sufficiently to pilot an aircraft, an impressive list of organisations has worked with Charlotte Storey to gain her insights into human performance and the benefits of audacious self-leadership, these include HM Royal Marines Band, BBC, Disney, Nickelodeon, The Bank of England, Nat West Bank, Warburtons and Homebase.

As a disabled woman, Charlotte is able to advise and guide both small, high-performance teams, in addition to addressing the challenges faced by larger, more diverse organisations around the advantages of actively recruiting a diverse workforce, of the unique potential women leaders bring to previously male-dominated spaces, self-mastery and proactivity, transformational leadership as an antidote to transactional management, the importance of self-nurture and the benefits of preserving time within the working day for reflection and retreat, and resilience in adversity; strategies for conquering fear-based reactive behaviours.

Charlotte Storey embodies the successful outcomes of implementing these strategies learnt from overcoming the ‘catastrophe’ of her own disability.

Charlotte is currently working on a book about conquering adversity to reach the heights entitled, Not the Whole Storey, in which Charlotte gives a highly humorous account of the self-mastery techniques she developed in response to her own complex genetic illness; techniques that took her from long-term in-patient to London’s West End stage, from losing the use of her right arm, to becoming pilot in command of her own light aircraft.

In this book and in her talks, Charlotte addresses the physical and psychological challenges that leaders face when integrating change, highlighting the need to both problem-solve using flow and bloom techniques, and to know that the best kind of self-leadership is when you discover something cannot be achieved and having the courage to communicate to the team the need for a fresh direction.

Charlotte is the driving force behind senior executives returning to the workforce better able to lead and inspire, knowledgeable about how to tease out the dormant potential within the team, more adept at embedding the skills for continued resilience, improved team cohesion, and collective mission.

Key Talking Points

Performing Under Pressure: Building a Strong Presentation Arsenal for Pitching and Keynote Success

Performance anxiety leads to lost business. Teams need a suite of mental, physical, and vocal approaches to maximise the effectiveness of keynotes and pitches.

As a leading expert in elite performance mastery, Charlotte uses unconscious mind psychology and physical embodiment techniques to break the cycle of performance anxiety in high-achieving individuals seeking to maximise their personal impact.

Unconscious Bias

Disabled in her 40s, Charlotte Storey has seen this situation from both sides, as an able-bodied unconsciously biased employer, and a disabled employee, in response to which she delivers an amusing, interactive, highly engaging, and transformational view of the creativity and problem-solving skills inherent in the disabled psyche.

Introversion to Influence

She uses ‘push and pull’ actor training methods to highlight the dynamic listening skills essential for
effective leadership by examining how to balance personal authority factors with the need to master
the gamut of leadership styles in response to the demands of teams and customers.

Leading with Audacity

The measure of a daring leader can be quantified by the number of those who follow without coercion. Ambitious workforces require courageous ground breakers to maximise their collective potential.

She uses the story of overcoming the loss of the use of her arm to become pilot in command of an aircraft to challenge preconceptions about self-imposed limitation.

Improving employee wellbeing and reversing silent quitting

As a theatre director, adept at working with elite ensembles, Charlotte talks to disunified teams and their leaders about how to cultivate dynamic listening skills within the workforce.

She highlights techniques that raise awareness about the importance of sensing without seeing and reading and reacting appropriately to non-verbal communication to maximise team cohesion.

Experience over skills

Unable to read a note of music and never having had a drama lesson, Charlotte achieved the heights as a professional performer and coach and encourages businesses to look beyond qualifications to see the value of experience over skills in building a high functioning team.

Diversity and equality

Charlotte talks about the challenges of growing up gay in a strict religious household, and of the need for better workplace training around collective intelligence to harness the skills of a wide-cross section of society.

All behaviour is communication

Charlotte’s childhood was cancelled by her father’s spinal disability, and as a young carer, she struggled with social isolation, rage, and depression. She presents effective approaches to interpreting people’s non-verbal barriers to integration highlighting the need to embrace compassionate approaches to leadership.